User profile: boco

This is one of several articles in the media elsewhere that have the lead of the story that this budget cancels the Yucca repository. The Obama administration has made clear that it intends to "terminate" the facility there, the government has yet do so. The site was approved by Congress and signed into law by the previous president (subject to getting a license from the NRC and, one imagines, court challenges.) Therefore it will take an act of Congress to cancel the project. Reid can't pull that off.

What is the rush? Well, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act said the government (DOE) must begin waste acceptance for disposal in a repository (which the Sun refers to as a "dump,") by January 1998. Further, DOE signed contracts promising commercial reactor owners that such disposal would begin then. DOE did not and got sued for breach of contracts. DOE now estimates the liability for that failure to be at least $12.3 billion. Taxpayers, including Nevadans, will foot the bill for that.
I doubt if "the industry" said that spent fuel is "too risky" to leave it where it is. What industry and technical experts more likely have said is that the waste cannot stay at reactor storage sites indefinitely. At the risk of being repititious, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act says so, too. If you don't like it, change the law.

Rep. Berkley refers to the $100 billion to build Yucca Mountain. That is not totally accurate. The July 2008 Total Systems Life Cycle Cost report from DOE estimates $96.2 billion to build a repository at Yucca for 122,100 metric tons of waste. But, present law limits the capacity to 70,000 metric tons. DOE assumed for purposes of analysis that Congress would either lift the limit or that a second repository would have comparable costs. Nowhere in the TSLCC is there a cost estimate for a 70,000 ton repository.

Chu and President Obama say the Yucca repository will be "terminated" and is now "dead." There seems to be an unanswered question as to the authority that the Administration has to make that judgment. In 2002, when Congress overrode former Governor Guinn's "veto" of the designation of Yucca as a suitable repository site, subject to obtaining a license from the NRC, that resolution became Public Law 107-200.

In similar letters, 18 senators and two ranking members of House committees asked Secretary Chu to provide Congress the scientific and legal basis for the decision that Yucca is "not an option." Since ratepayers have paid close to $30 billion in fees and interest for disposal that was to have begun 11 years ago, they need answers to those questions as well.

Aww...Obama gets coerced to make a pledge to stop the Yucca Mountain repository to placate Reid and gain some votes in Nevada and now that he follows through, the State is crying that it can't get enough money from the Nuclear Waste Fund to continue the State's further efforts to defeat the project the President calls "terminated." Yeh, that seems fair.